The Advantages of Choosing a WordPress-Based Ecommerce Platform

Adding eCommerce to a website is one of the best things that any commercial business can do to increase sales, turnover and profit. With an ecommerce store you make it infinitely simpler for prospective customers to find products they like and then to place an order from the comfort of their home.

What’s more though, you’ll also be cutting your overheads this way. Instead of having a high street store or taking orders over the phone, you’ll now be allowing your customers to make purchases entirely on their own with no need for you to help them. This makes a huge difference because it means that you can take orders without needing a member of staff present and without even needing a physical location. That immediately means you aren’t paying half as many overheads: no salary, no rent, no bills. The only overheads are shipping and the cost of hosting your website.

All this and you’ll be expanding your potential customer base to people right across the world!

But while an ecommerce store is always a great idea, not all ecommerce stores are made equal. Here we will take a look at what a WordPress ecommerce store is and at why this is such a useful and powerful tool.

What is a WordPress Based eCommerce Store?

Basically, WordPress is a CMS – or Content Management System. This means that you can use it to build your website, to add a design and to manage your content. Uploading a post is as simple as clicking ‘new post’ and then entering the content into a box and editing existing content is similarly a straightforward process.

At the same time, WordPress also has the distinct advantage of allowing you to easily and seamlessly make updates and additions to the site itself. This is helped in part by the ability to add themes (which change the entire design at the click of a button) or to install plugins (which are basically small ‘apps’ which add extra functionality to your website).

Most websites these days are creating in WordPress (at least for new, small businesses) and if you’re unsure as to what your web design was created with, there’s a good chance it’s probably WordPress. This then means you can easily use those plugins to update and improve your site and this gives you a very quick and easy way to build an ecommerce store.

Ecommerce Stores as WordPress Plugins

That’s because an ecommerce store can be added to WordPress as simply as adding a new plugin. One of the best known examples of this is WooCommerce, which is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms while also being entirely based on WordPress.

Advantages of going this route for your online store

For starters, creating an ecommerce store through WordPress is the simplest and easiest way to get up and running with your own shop. You now don’t have to build your own store from scratch (which would be known as a custom ecommerce store) but nor are you going to be limited by having an externally hosted store (meaning that your shop is part of another website that you simply link to).

With a WordPress store, you have full control over the platform but it’s incredibly simple and easy to make changes.

What’s more, as with the rest of WordPress, there is a huge amount of support and additional features available for platforms like WooCommerce. If you are looking for ecommerce website developers for instance to upgrade your site, you’ll find that almost all of them are familiar with WooCommerce. On top of all this, ecommerce website developers will often charge less when working with WooCommerce owing to its simplicity.

Likewise, if you should have any problems with your store, you’ll only have to check a forum quickly to be provided with all the answers you could possibly need. And that support extends to even more plugins and even more themes which you can use to quickly and easily switch up your design or add entirely new features. Better yet, all of these plugins and themes will be perfectly integrated with WordPress itself meaning that you can add elements across the whole site to make your store work even better with the help of Custom WordPress web development!

Why Choose Other Options?

As you can see then, choosing a platform like WooCommerce has a ton of advantages and will simply make your ecommerce development simpler, easier and more reliable – all things you should aim for as a business.

So why isn’t everyone using WooCommerce? There are a number of reasons but usually it comes down to the (slight) limitations presented by going this route. For instance, if you choose WooCommerce your site will only really be suitable for featuring about 50 items at once. And while the store will be very customizable, there will still be some limitations on what you can do to the layout/checkout process.

So if you’re Amazon, then you need a custom built solution. For everyone else? Certainly consider going the Custom WordPress plugin route!

About the Author - Sankar

The founder and mastermind behind ColorWhistle is Sankarnarayan, a professional with over fourteen years of experience and a passion for website design services and digital marketing services.
At ColorWhistle, our team has a wide range of skills and expertise and we always put our clients’ satisfaction first. This is what sets us apart from the competition – an eye for detail and the best website development services from the start to the completion of your project.